SPRING 2024

My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion by Sasha Denisova (Wilma Theater). A screening and Q&A with the director Yury Urnov 
February 22, 6:30 pm

​Maria Galina. Communiqués. Bilingual poetry reading and Q&A with translators Ainsley Morse and Anna Halberstadt
​March 13, 6 pm

Roman Utkin. "Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin." Book talk and Q&A 
March 27, 6:30 pm

Anna Nemzer and Ilia Veniavkin. "Putin's Playbook: Understanding Russian Politics through the Media Archive" 
April 3, 6:30 pm

"Banned Books from the Cold War to the Present." International Conference (CUNY Graduate Center) 
May 10-11

​Victor Martinovich. "“Why Did Pythia Foretell the Future in the Temple of Apollo?” A reading and conversation with the author
​May 30, 6:30 pm
My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion by Sasha Denisova. (Wilma Theater). A screening and Q&A with the director Yury Urnov. Thursday, February 22, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Sasha’s 82-year-old mother has lived in Kyiv her whole life. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, Sasha copes with her fears by imagining her mother in increasingly fantastical situations: strategizing with President Zelenskyy, striking Russian drones with jars of pickles, and even debating with God. Playwright Sasha Denisova was inspired by her online chats with her mother to write this darkly funny and deeply heartfelt new play.

"My mother was born on the very day when the Germans were bombing so, when I told her to go to the bomb shelter, the first thing she said was: ‘I’m not going there. I was born there.’ That gave the start to our ongoing fight because she didn’t let me come and take her out and, as you will see in the play, this is a woman of a strong character, as all Ukrainian women are." -- Sasha Denisova, The Guardian

Sasha Denisova is a playwright, a director, a writer, and a Ukrainian. Born in Kiev, she graduated from the Philology Department of Kiev Taras Shevchenko University and subsequently studied theatre and worked at various theatre companies in Russia. Her play Light My Fire was awarded Russia’s highest theatre prize, The Golden Mask, in 2012. As a playwright and director Sasha has produced more than 25 performances at Moscow stages. She makes sharply social, political theater in which documentary material merges with magical and fantastical. Sasha fled Moscow for Poland immediately after the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine. At the same time, all of Sasha’s productions in Russia were shut down. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion she has written and staged 4 plays, all of them about the war: Six Ribs of Anger, about the fate of Ukrainian refugees in Europe; My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion; The Hague, an account of a tribunal against Putin and his gang that takes place in the imagination of a Ukrainian girl from Mariupol; and Bakhmut, a story of two women who mourn the same man, an intellectual whom they had loved and who gave his life for his country. 

Born in Moscow, Russia, Yury Urnov graduated from the Russian Academy of Theater Art (GITIS) in 2000 with an MFA and since then has directed over 40 productions in his home country, Europe, and Africa.  He currently serves as a Co-Artistic director at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Yury recently directed My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion, Twelfth Night, Minor Character, and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play. His other US directing credits include Hedda Gabler and Ubu Roi at Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, the award-winning Thr3e Zisters at Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, The Pillowman at Forum Theater in DC, Putin on Ice and One Hour Eighteen Minutes with ACME Corporation Theater of Baltimore, and also KISS, Marie Antoinette, and You for Me for You at Woolly Mammoth Theater in DC, where Yury has been a proud company member since 2014. In 2009-2011, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Towson University, MD where he still teaches. Yury serves as an Associate Director of the Center for International Theater Development, Baltimore. During his 20-yearlong partnership with the CITD Yury participated in and co-produced multiple US-East European cultural exchange projects. He also translated plays of Martin McDonagh, Sarah Ruhl, and Edward Albee into Russian, and several contemporary Russian plays into English.
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Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Maria Galina. ​Communiqués. Bilingual poetry reading and conversation with translators Ainsley Morse and Anna Halberstadt. Wednesday, March 13, 6 pm. Chanin Language Center (B126 Hunter West). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Translators Ainsley Morse and Anna Halberstadt present their bilingual edition of Maria Galina’s poetry and diaries (Cicada Press, 2024) written in Odesa during the first six months of the Russia-Ukraine war. 

"Maria Galina’s poems, completed on the brink of Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine, capture a particular moment of Russophone poetry. Readers are to face instances of poems written on the edge, capturing the moment before in extremis, pulsating with unease and disbelief, and therefore, or because of that, offering all kinds of unforeseen experiments, shifts, and transgressions." -- Ostap Kin

Maria Galina is a prose writer, poet, literary translator, and literary critic who incorporates strong elements of fantasy and myth into her writings. She is a marine biologist by education. Born in the Soviet Union in Kalinin (now known as Tver), Galina grew up in Soviet Ukraine and studied biology in Odesa. She also studied salmon in Bergen, Norway, in the early 1990s. She lived and worked in Moscow for decades, but as of February 2022 lives in Ukraine (Odesa). She made her debut as a published fiction writer in the late nineties, and her first poems appeared in national publications in 1993. Galina has gone on to publish several other novels, including Malaya Glusha (L’Organization), Mole-Crickets, and Autochthons. Galina has received prizes for her poetry, which has been translated into many languages. Communiqués is her first book of poetry in English translation. She is also a literary critic who worked for years in the literary criticism department of the prestigious “thick” literary journal Novyi mir.

Ainsley Morse teaches in East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Anna Halberstadt, born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania, is a NYC-based psychologist, poet and translator. 

Directions: at the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around and look for Chanin Language Center. Room B126 is to your right through the door and up the stairs.
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Roman Utkin. "Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin." Book talk and Q&A. Wednesday, March 27, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states. Charlottengrad (Wisconsin UP, 2023) analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.

Roman Utkin is Associate Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies as well as of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. He specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Russophone poetry, prose, and visual culture. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Anna Nemzer and Ilia Veniavkin. "Putin's Playbook: Understanding Russian Politics through the Media Archive." Wednesday, April 3, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required.  

No dictatorship ever relies solely on pure force. To achieve their goals, they often deceive, manipulate facts, discredit dissenters and bribe doubters. All this is necessary so that society does not notice how the space of freedom is gradually shrinking. Over the past 24 years, the political regime in Russia has undergone a radical transformation and developed its own repertoire of lies and manipulations. TV Dozhd journalist and co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive Anna Nemzer explores the evolution of Putin’s playbook in her YouTube show. At this public talk we will discuss how the archive of Russian independent media helps her in this work and what discoveries she has made.  
 
Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on Dozhd (TV-Rain), the Russian independent TV channel, now working in exile; a scholar at Bard College; and a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as important evidence of the era.
 
Ilia Veniavkin is a historian, civic engineer, and a journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive and a scholar at Bard College. He is now writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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"Banned Books from the Cold War to the Present." International Conference. May 10-11. CUNY Graduate Center, Skylight Room (9100). Free and open to the public. Photo ID required. 

The conference seeks to revisit the legacy of banned books and state censorship from the Cold War to the present in the East European context. It aims to spotlight clandestine circulation, publication, and reception of banned books in the past and their resonance today, when creative expression is again under threat due to political upheavals, wars, migration crises, and the resulting cultural exterritoriality. The purpose of the conference is to situate these processes comparatively, across various geopolitical contexts and genres, with a focus on Eastern Europe. World-leading specialists from different disciplines (historians, literary scholars, librarians, archivists, journalists, publishers, and writers) will explore banned books and exterritorial publishing from a theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives, e.g., the covert publications and circulation of Orwell’s novels behind the Iron Curtain, war narratives that violate state doctrines from WWII to the present, banned books in the Internet era, East European diasporas and literary institutions.

To download the conference program, please click here. 

The conference is sponsored by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences and co-hosted by Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Venue:

CUNY Graduate Center
Skylight Room (9100)
365 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10016
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​Victor Martinovich. "Why Did Pythia Foretell the Future in the Temple of Apollo?” A trilingual reading and conversation about art, literature and an alternative future for Belarus. Thursday, May 30, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

When in 2014 the 3rd novel of Victor Martinovich Mova appeared in Belarus, it sounded like a dark dystopia. Today, the still remaining copies of Belarusian literary classics have become “illegal” like drugs. What is this all about in a country whose government praised national culture, literature and theater? 
 
In 2016, as Martinovich toured in Germany with Voland und Quist’s translation of Mova, he talked about the upcoming big war. Again, it sounded like a delusion, since Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were “best Slavic friends” with each other forever. In May 2022, the Ukrainian translation of Mova was about to appear in Kiev, but it never happened, because of the war: the biggest war in Europe since 1945. 
 
Victor's debut novel Paranoia foresaw the atmosphere of 2021-2024. His last published novel, Revolution, tells the story of failed uprisings (in the Fall of 2020, when there were still so many illusions in Belarus and about Belarus). It is also a story about the futility of the struggle for power, since Lancelot is always the next Dragon (as in Evgeny Shvarts’ eponymous play). 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: [email protected]